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Review of Hannah Cowley’s Who’s the Dupe? A Farce, Script-in-Hand Performance, Mordan Hall, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, 3 May 2022.

On the 250th anniversary of the publication of its final volume, the author of this article explores what makes Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy such a landmark in the history of the novel as a form, and advises on how you might read this comic masterpiece.

This thesis examines the periodical culture that operated in late eighteenth-century Britain (predominantly though not exclusively in London) and the ways in which it made the female ‘stars’ of the stage. I propose that actresses’ celebrity was in part made in the media; the press coverage they received has not had the same attention as their treatment through other media, such as the memoir or portraiture. Through a combination of literary and cultural analysis, this thesis examines the ‘media texts’ that circulated in the periodical press about three contemporaneous actresses: Sarah Siddons, Elizabeth Farren and Mary Wells. Three central questions drive this thesis. What role did the periodical press play in the development of actresses’ celebrity in the late eighteenth century? What rhetorical strategies were used in the newspapers to represent actresses’ public identities and how did these verbal images correspond with other media? How did readers and subjects engage with news media as a shared space for shaping celebrity identities? In exploring answers to these questions this work aims to contribute to the ongoing reevaluation of the centrality of media in early celebrity and to an understanding of the daily, weekly and monthly circulation of motifs that created and sustained celebrity identities. It also makes the case that an emergent celebrity culture in this period was shaped in and through an exploration of gendered (female) performance and the limits of its agency. Part I describes the media landscape in relation to the stage. Chapter 1 describes the ways in which the stage represented newspapers and their reception. Chapter 2 turns to the ways in which newspapers represented the stage. Part II offers case studies. Chapter 3 argues that the press treated ambivalently Sarah Siddons’s background as a stroller. Chapter 4 focuses on the kind of ‘credit’ newspapers accorded Elizabeth Farren’s portrayal of the character of the ‘lady’ on and off stage. And Chapter 5 demonstrates that, despite her close association with newspapers, Mary Wells failed to secure the kind of celebrity she craved through the press.

Discourse on sympathy in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Britain took place in many intellectual contexts, including philosophy, aesthetics, evolutionary science, and physiological psychology. Concomitantly, the science of religion was a rising enterprise that largely transferred the study of religion from theologians to philologists, cultural evolutionists, and anthropologists as it sought to produce a comparative, systematic account of the growth and nature of religious belief. This thesis contends that these ostensibly disparate aspects of the intellectual climate overlapped in the literary marketplace as women writers combined the popular and specialized researches of each, both in answer to public anxieties these discourses fostered and in an effort to wield their fiction to ethical, social, and political purpose. It considers the fiction of three women with very various backgrounds, intellectual pursuits, and writing styles – that of George Eliot (1819–1880), Vernon Lee (1856–1935), and Edna Lyall (1857–1903) – and sets their work side by side to discern a common thread running through their oeuvres: a pattern of fictional ‘many-sided’ male sympathetic figures arranged to balance broad tolerance with specific function and achieve a form of modern spirituality for the benefit of the reader and society at large. Translated from the German Vielseitigkeit in the 1830s, the term ‘manysidedness’ initially entered the lexicon to describe the multi-faceted mind of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), whose influence sat at the heart of much of the science of religion initiative. By mid-century it became a conduit for thinking about sympathy via its close association with positions of tolerance, impartiality, and acculturation. Intentionalist in nature and experimenting with ‘surface reading’ as methodology, this research has resulted in a fruitful exploration of sympathy both as a form of ‘doubling’ and as a continual intellectual and emotional unfolding akin to the interpretation of manysidedness as a model of self-cultivation. Each author is examined in light of her affinity with a male thinker: Eliot is paired with the philologist and scholar of comparative religion, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900); Lee is viewed in relation to the aestheticism of her friend Walter Pater (1839–1894); Lyall is explored through her compassionate response to the suffering of the freethinker Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891).